Obama’s Gas Tax Benefit

By Chris Suellentrop

Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter thinks Barack Obama’s “decision to push back on the gas tax actually worked,” helping Obama to win decisively in North Carolina and lose narrowly in Indiana. “Refusing to pander reminded his base among college-educated voters of the reasons they liked him in the first place,” Alter writes. He adds:

It also helped Obama recover his rhythm. After watching him sink some baskets on Sunday, I had a few words with him. “I feel really good about that [the gas tax position],” he said. “We had veered into the conventional, and now we’re back.” This was a huge gamble and it paid off.

Harvard economist Greg Mankiw thinks the decision by John McCain and Hillary Clinton to support a temporary repeal of the gas tax “says a lot about the character of the candidates.” He writes on his personal blog:

Many economic issues (e.g., health care, corporate taxation, the trade deficit) are vastly complicated, with experts holding a variety of opinions. When candidates disagree, it simply means that each is siding with a different set of experts, and it is hard for laymen to figure out which set of experts is right. By contrast, the gas tax holiday is not nearly as complicated, and the experts speak with one voice.

Why, then, are candidates proposing the holiday? I can think of three hypotheses:

Ignorance: They don’t know that the consensus of experts is opposed.

Hubris: They know the experts are opposed, but they think they know better.

Mendacity with a dash of condescension: They know the experts are opposed, and they secretly agree, but they think they can win some votes by pulling the wool over the eyes of an ill-informed electorate.

So which of these three hypotheses is right? I don’t know, but whichever it is, it says a lot about the character of the candidates.